George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  In appearance, Clooney is rough-shaven throughout, typically sporting a green baseball cap. Apart from the brief scene in the bar and approaching Sully (William Fichter) about a job, we do not see him outside a work-related situation. Even in the bar, he is coming off the phone from arranging another trip out and delivering the news to Murph and Bobby, and in speaking to Sully, the harsh economic realities of the community dependent on fishing help to explain character choices (Sully is working for free for a friend).

  There is a flirtatious element in Tyne’s exchanges with Chris Cotter (Diane Lane), on his side at least (“not only is she pretty, she’s smart”), but she hates him, less for who he is but for taking Bobby away. For his part he remains civil, taking his leave at the bar with a “Ma’am” to Chris and Murph’s ex-wife. Here is also a tiny gesture of tipping his chin up, often used as a greeting, but here not directed at any particular character and denoting a moment of thought. There is an oscillation between a manner that is polite and one that is more blunt: he sets out the proposition of heading out again but adds, “Join me, don’t join me,” claiming he will go with or without them and their replacements are only a phone call away. Since they do not call his bluff we do not know how real this threat was, but there is an uncompromising side to Tyne’s character, which is perhaps an integral part of surviving at sea but on land can make him seem a little brusque, possibly explaining his failed marriage.

  Tyne is seen certainly as driven but not incompetent. Linda pays tributes to his knowledge of charts, and he seems to believe his later assertion to Bobby that he is doing what he “was made to do.” Later as he settles into his captain’s chair, cap pulled over his face, this seems possible. The low angle of him stepping out onto the bridge and the reverse angle of him looking down at the men waiting expectantly suggest that (at this point) they are happy to serve under him and how he relishes the position. On board, he is the one who makes decisive action, breaking up the fight between Sully and Murph, shooting the shark, resuscitating Murph when he is back on board, and stitching his hand.

  The work, especially the laying out of nets, is hard and dangerous, including operating at night with little sleep, while being sprayed with freezing cold water. Top shots of real fisherman landing fish are intercut relatively seamlessly with closer shots of the main actors in low-angle close-up apparently landing them. We see the extremely cramped living conditions on board, Sully’s view that, although fit to do the job, he does not “see the romance in it,” and the fact that even without accidents, men die on board as the life is so hard. Murph’s son wants to be with his dad but he definitely does not want to be a fisherman. The old man at the bar who notes ruefully that he was out on the Flemish Cap in ’62 is a physical representation of the potential future of the crew, if they live that long. There is even some related genuine suffering among the film crew (in front of and behind the camera) in being blasted with wind machines, sprayed with powerful hoses, and rocked by some fairly vicious wave machines in Warner Brothers’ immense Soundstage 16 (Wahlberg in particular was often seasick).

  The prime reason few ambiguities attach themselves to Clooney’s character is the sentiment that drives the film. Few others question the actions of the captain, except at the beginning when Chris resents Tyne’s suggestion about going to sea at all, rather than precisely where, and the two exchanges in the boathouse with Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg) are both cast as a father and son with Bobby in no position to question the actions of his senior as well as superior officer. The first of the two scenes, in which Bobby declares that he loves the sea but cannot stand being more than two feet away from the woman he loves, prompts a laconic replay from Tyne: “Then you’ve got a problem, son.” Here, Tyne praises him and calls him “a natural,” casting him as a form of successor. The second, in the growing storm, sees Tyne as an angry father, calling Bobby “nothing but a punk.” We see tears of frustration welling up in Tyne’s eyes as he hears the crew shouting to each other to motivate each other, clearly dispirited. However, there is also an element of paranoia in his verbal assault on Bobby, assuming the men are talking about “how I lost it” and telling Bobby, whom he had praised earlier, “don’t fuck with me.” There does not seem to be much between these two extremes of indulgence and abuse. The mini-mutiny that takes place when the men state that they want to go home provokes a scathing response from Tyne, and it seems that clichés are enough to win them back (“separating the men from the boys” and “this is the moment of truth”). By the time that Linda Greenlaw (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) screams her warning into the radio that he is “headed straight for the monster,” the script is closer to the poetry of Moby Dick than rational argument.

  As the storms converge, it seems that Tyne becomes almost unhinged as he yells at the waves as much as his fellow crew members and there is a sense of a Lear-like loss of sanity. This can be seen as an admirable obstinacy, an unwillingness to accept what fate has thrown at them, or an irresponsible loss of sanity, that he literally leads the men needlessly to their deaths. There is a fatalistic streak to Tyne’s character (“I want to catch some fish, it’s what I do”), which lends his role a sense of driven determination, but for Clooney it also deprives him of much depth to play with. The commercial pressures are clear from the outset, but it seems that even were this not the case, Tyne would still rather be at sea than on dry land. Rather than an exploration of a fully rounded psychological entity, it feels more like a lament for decisions based on tradition and feeling. There is inevitability about the narrative in which rationalism is passed over in favor of superstition (the crew sees a rogue wave, a low haul, and the shark attack, as signs of bad luck, as if their voyage is cursed).

  In the script, credited to Bill Wittliff but with an uncredited rewrite from veteran Bo Goldman, Tyne does not smash the radio like Quint in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). On the contrary, he keeps trying to communicate and even goes to extreme lengths, hanging from a mast with the blowtorch trying to reattach an antenna. However, Tyne acts as a focus for the elegiac sentiments that underpin the film. His longest speech is the lyrical description of heading out to sea, which he delivers to Linda to explain his love of the job and returns as a voice-over at the end as his requiem. It is present too in the virtually omnipresent orchestral score of James Horner, which casts a grand, elegiac tone over the film, from its opening images to any wider shot at sea. Horner, responsible for over 100 film scores, such as James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), represents the Hollywood mainstream in terms of composing.

  Without a radio, Tyne claims that “we’re back in the nineteenth century.” However, he is no Ahab. He asks the crew if they want to carry on and shows them the fax showing the storm fronts. They give in relatively easily, although once out at sea, perhaps they have little real choice. We pan around their faces but the option to wait it out or “to say to hell with it and drive right through it” is hardly equal in dramatic terms. It feels like a speech before battle, equating to surrendering or fighting on. At the same time the film tries to give Tyne the aura of a slightly darker figure, choosing to step back into the shadows of his boat rather than swim to the surface. It draws on the cliché of the captain unwilling to leave his ship, but there is more the sense of a marine version of agoraphobia, possibly an inability to function outside a familiar environment, which are also overtones of the “go-it-alone” hero of detective fiction as he declares, “I don’t like partners, business partners that is.”

  The heroics of the Coast Guard rescue almost seem like a subplot. The yacht sequences especially, whether based on fact or not, feel like additions to show Tyne in a more positive light. Tyne has a professional reason to do what he does and, despite his ultimate demise, is seen as an expert seaman. The yacht is engaged in a foolhardy pleasure cruise, arguably taking rescue crews away from their ability to reach the Andrea Gail. On board, the film becomes quite episodic, as we shift from one obstacle to another (releasing a flying “anchor” that t
hreatens to smash the wheelhouse or turning the boat around) usually followed by an element of euphoric whooping, which seems progressively empty. A beatific moment of hope is signaled by a glimpse of the sun at a moment of calm but Tyne realizes, unlike Bobby, that they are not going to escape. He plows on, up an almost vertical wave (the iconic poster shot for the film) before the ship is flipped over and sinks.

  It is debatable how historically accurate the film can be, since there were no survivors, no wreckage was found beyond a few pieces of deck gear, and the data on the nearest buoy went off the scale. In the foreword to the 1997 nonfiction account of the same name, Junger explicitly rules out fictionalizing his material, feeling “that risked diminishing the facts of whatever facts I was able to determine.”5 It is debatable, however, how far the book follows this resolution with extended passages written in the present tense, effectively guessing what is happening at any given time. The film is really an exercise in dramatized conjecture but with the one element that Junger rejected making up: dialogue. Incidents that Junger records over an entire career, like being pulled overboard, a shark landing on deck, or the wheelhouse windows being blown out, are condensed in the film, all happening on a single trip.6 Junger recounts tales of captains who have stayed with their boats and conjectures Tyne “heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell” (language that the script appropriates, recasts, and puts in the mouth of Linda).7

  It is clearly to the film’s advantage if it can emphasize the support of the local community in its making, and certainly featurettes on the film’s extras include sequences with local people as extras, meeting the cast, and generally expressing positive views about their alter egos. Clooney and Wahlberg in particular went to some lengths to charm (or at least not antagonize) the community with Wahlberg staying in Bobby Shatford’s actual room in the real Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.

  In the case of Tyne, the film plays up a flirtatious relationship with Linda (the pair jokingly call each other captain, exchanging lingering stares, and this scene evokes his extended description of sailing out of harbor), whom the real man barely knew, and Petersen’s narrative also exaggerates the poor haul of fish he brings in at the beginning. The vindication of Tyne’s professionalism (his subsequent large haul of fish) may be a matter of wishful thinking as the ship was never recovered, although Clooney asserts on the extras that Tyne “was a good fisherman.” Perhaps then, as with any fictional scenario supposedly based on real events, it makes sense not to be too pedantic about authenticity. Although time and place are clear from the subtitle at the outset, and despite using the names of real people, the film is not claiming to be a documentary.

  A major part of the appeal is the special effects of models and the spectacle of environmental catastrophe (films portraying extreme weather proliferated through the 1990s, like Jan de Bont’s 1996 Twister), but despite the shots of giant waves and the helicopter rescues, it is the human drama that takes center stage. The incident in which Murph is dragged off the back of the boat gains in power by his disappearance being unnoticed by the others as they scrabble to pick up light sticks that Sully had dropped. The camera tracks up to Sully to provide a more powerful contrast with the reverse angle as Sully looks up to berate Murph and we have a shot of the empty space where he had been standing. It is space, absence rather than presence, that is significant. Death at sea can be sudden and unannounced. The reconciliation between Sully and Murph is effective in its portrayal of male emotional illiteracy. Even Murph, the one who seems the man most able to express emotions to others in the whole film, still cannot bring himself to apologize. Sully draws on cliché (“You’d have done the same for me”) but he is aware of its emptiness (“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”). The distance between the two men, placed on the edges of the frame, right outside the T-frame, makes it clear that this is unlikely.

  The film is partly a celebration of the human spirit but also strangely of forces beyond human control, implicitly a sign of divine power. When Tyne sees they are doomed, he personifies the storm (“She’s not going to let us out”) and earlier exhorted the men to pray. Whether Tyne represents hubris inviting punishment, or the grandeur of human resistance in the face of insurmountable odds, depends on how engaging viewers find his character. The crew each accept their fate stoically, perhaps Murph most of all, selflessly noting that “it’s gonna be hard on my little boy.” However, even here sentimentality creeps in with Bobby, hardly the most articulate member of the crew, expressing the simple but poetic farewell to Christine, “It’s only love,” which (even more sentimentally) she somehow hears in her dreams and then shares with Ethel, Bobby’s mother (Junger records both women testifying that they really had such dreams). If we are swept up in the emotion of the moment, particularly by the score, this might work; if not, it might seem a desperate (if understandable) way to derive meaning from something which denies human understanding.

  The film’s general attitude to its subject is one of respect. Irene cares enough for Michael to see him off at the dockside, Sully responds to a fellow human being (Murph) to save his life, and Murph shows magnanimity toward his ex-wife’s new partner. The final scene is the church service to the men, and the film as a whole is clearly a testament to their memory. Their full names remind us of how wider society views them, but the final words are Tyne’s impassioned speech about moving out of harbor, giving the ending the veneer of an upbeat ending as well as reflecting the notions of the men’s souls setting forth on a spiritual journey. Throughout, there is a wish not to alienate the Gloucester community, but all this admirable behavior is a little too close to lionization to make the film dramatically credible and engaging as a whole.

  Conclusion

  It has been 10 years now since Clooney starred in an overtly action-driven picture. The American, although trailed as an action film, is far more of an exploration of an individual’s soul. Part of this shift is probably due to a wish to produce a body of work more thoughtful and dialogue based in nature and partly due to the simple mechanics of age. It becomes more difficult, as Sean Connery and Roger Moore found, to be accepted as the credible hero of an action narrative into one’s 50s. There is a personal element too in the toll that such films take on the human body. After injuring himself quite seriously on Syriana, Clooney may well think long and hard about accepting such roles in the future, possibly one reason behind his dropping out of a remake of The Man from Uncle.

  Chapter 4

  A Mixture of Several Genres

  Genre is one of the key concepts by which viewers make sense of what they watch. It is one of the key factors that we use to help decide whether we even choose to watch a film at all. To the experience of any given film we each bring a host of assumptions about kinds of locations, situations, dialogue, and forms of resolution that we expect. If the filmmaker disrupts those expectations too sharply, we may react with confusion, boredom, or even anger. If generic boundaries are not pushed at all, a film may seem wholly predictable and forgettable. It is a notable feature of Clooney’s career that since 1997, he has chosen to be involved with films that stretch generic boundaries, sometimes significantly further than critics and general audiences expect, and in particular to blend existing genres.

  From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996)

  Seth Gecko:

  Do you think this is what I am?

  The difficulties for some viewers perhaps lie in the genres, which the film attempts to mix (gangster, western, and horror). The film is really a celebration of exploitation cinema, and reviewers unfamiliar with this often criticize the film by unwittingly listing the typical components of this subgenre: a blend of big-star names with an unapologetically lurid portrayal of sex, violence, and special effects.

  The opening sequence ends before the titles roll with Seth Gecko (George Clooney) berating his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), about the meaning of the term “low-profile”: “It is not taking girls hostage. It is not shooting police. It is n
ot setting fire to a building.” With a less brutal scene before this, such dialogue might find its natural home in a comedy or buddy movie. The theatricality of the opening scene in the store is underlined as Rodriguez’s camera pans from the ranger as he briefly exits the scene to reveal the Gecko brothers in hiding, bringing them forward into shot and then pushing them back out again. It feels like a more decorous theatrical form of art with which Richie has no patience, unable to wait for his cue but stepping onto the “stage” of the action and acting preemptively, shooting the ranger with little apparent justification.

  The progression of the main section of the narrative, once the characters are holed up at the club, slides into more familiar monster movie territory, anticipated by the red, George Romero-style titles at the beginning. The presence of special effects expert and horror director Tom Savini in the cast, and a narrative that quickly descends into a series of battles to the death with supernatural creatures, shift the film into low-budget horror.

  From the outset, we are not in a fictional landscape dominated by realism. Richie holds up his hand with a hole blown in it, not to howl in pain but to look through it at Seth in wonder. The same shot had already been used in Terminator II (James Cameron, 1991) and would reappear in the TV movie of Stephen King’s Thinner (Tom Holland, 1996). If this were not enough, as the car drives out of shot Rodriguez gives us a privileged view through the body of the car to the female hostage being held within, perhaps influenced by Michel Gondry’s 1993 video for Björk’s Human Behavior, which featured a similar shot of the singer being eaten by a bear but remaining visible in its stomach. The fact that Cheech Marin plays not only a border guard (with a badge reading “Oscar Marin,” the name of his real father) but also the parts of Chet Pussy and Carlos suggests that there is less a focus on fully rounded psychological characters than on action. Similarly, Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) is killed in this film but reappears playing the same character in volume 1 of Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003), Deathproof (2007), and Planet Terror (2007).